Row, Tom

ORAL HISTORY OF TOM ROW
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
August 29, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: All right, this is Keith McDaniel, and today is August the 29th, 2011, and I’m at the home of Tom Row, here in Oak Ridge. Tom, thanks for taking some time to talk to us. Mr. Row: Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity. Mr. McDaniel: This is about your life, from the very beginning, so let’s go back to the very beginning. Tell me where you were born, and something about your family, and where you went to school. Mr. Row: My family arrived in the Washington, D.C. area in the late 1890s. They were farmers and bought land in Falls Church, Virginia, and my grandfather developed a chicken farm from which he delivered eggs, and each July we would go to Falls Church area, catch the streetcar down to Washington to the Rosalyn area, which is now concrete and brick. There was a streetcar turnaround, and we had a picnic lunch, and watched the fireworks on the Washington, D.C. campus there, and then caught the streetcar back home, and drove back up to the grandparent’s, so July in Falls Church, Virginia, was something that I had as a regular thing as a child. My dad came to VPI for his education. There, he met – Mr. McDaniel: And what was that, Virginia Polytech – Mr. Row: Virginia Polytechnic Institute, in Blacksburg, Virginia. My dad was a chemical engineer. He got his Bachelor’s and Master’s there, met Mom there, and I was the result of that marriage, and they lived in Blacksburg for – probably about until 1938, when he went to Ohio State and got his doctorate in Chem Engineering. Interestingly enough, when I went back to Blacksburg for graduate school, I had the room that my parents lived in at my grandparent’s home, and my clothes closet was the closet off of that room where they had kept me in the bassinette. Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? [laughter] Mr. Row: So, I had a really unusual homecoming when I went to graduate school. Grandparents, Mom’s parents, Granddad was a contractor, built residential homes, and during World War II, after dad left VPI, he went to Ohio State, and then we went down to Lafayette, Louisiana, where he set up the Chemical Engineering Department at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in Lafayette. When World War II began, I remember coming home from church and we heard on the radio about Pearl Harbor. Dad was immediately contacted by American Viscose in Roanoke, Virginia, and asked if he would come back and be the technical engineer for the company that made rayon, which was used in all the tires for all the vehicles during the war. So we moved back to Roanoke and stayed there. An interesting sideline there was when the war was over, we visited the plant, and inside the plant was an eight-foot, khaki-colored wall, wooden wall, with triple barbwire on top, and they had been making anti-aircraft guns inside a large spinning room in the factory there that was making rayon, also. Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Mr. Row: And no one in town knew anything, dad never said anything about it, so it was a really interesting sideline. But I grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, had a marvelous time there. In fact, still great friends with many of the people I started second grade with, and we visit a couple times a year to enjoy things up there with them. Went to school at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, and got a Bachelor’s degree in Physics, and then was looking around for a place to go to graduate school, and I finally wound up at VPI in Blacksburg. Mom and Dad both graduated there, as did my granddad, so at some time in my formal education, I was bound to go to VPI. There was just no question about it. Mr. McDaniel: Right, right. Mr. Row: I get out of there in 1959, and looking around for a job. In those days, you started in November, and there were lots of job offers in those days. Had a chance to go to California, a chance to go down to the nuclear plant in South Carolina, but I had a chance to go to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and I went to my thesis advisor, Dr. Andy Robeson, who had been down to ORNL a number of times, and I asked him, I said, “What do you think about Oak Ridge National Lab?” and he said, “Oh, my gosh, that’s great.” He said, “That’s a wonderful place to work.” So about fifty percent of that comment stuck real hard, and when I made my decision, it was to come to Oak Ridge. I came to Oak Ridge on a visit and met Bob Sharpie. Mr. McDaniel: Now, what year was this, when you came for a visit? Mr. Row: ’59. Mr. McDaniel: ’59, okay. Mr. Row: Came to Oak Ridge in July, about the last day in June, moved into a Garden Apartment. It seemed like it was a hundred and twenty-five degrees; I’m sure it wasn’t. Cleaned all of the apartment up, and the next morning, I said, “I just gotta have an air conditioner.” So, this was 1959, and I went to Jackson Hardware in Jackson Square. Walked in, and the gentleman there, who turned out to be the gentleman Mr. Jackson, and I said, “I need an air conditioner.” He said, “I wish I had one for you,” and I said, “Okay, when will you be getting some more in?” And he said, “Next year.” Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Mr. Row: So I went to other stores in that foreign land of Knoxville and found one, but that’s just amazed me, and I knew I was moving into a very unusual town when they ran out of air conditioners the first of July. Mr. McDaniel: And they couldn’t get any more. [laughter]
Mr. Row: Couldn’t get any more until next year. Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Mr. Row: A very careful stock maintenance there. Mr. McDaniel: Sure, sure. Mr. Row: But my first few years here were naturally the ones of just learning what was expected and trying to do the best that you could. I came into Bud Perry’s physics group, and there I did a lot of calculations on reactor core physics and changing cladding, and this type thing, and the effect on the multiplication factors. So it was an interesting couple of years, but I really sort of felt I needed to do something else. I just was not challenged by that type of work, and, at the same time, I was reading a book, a monthly publication that was put out by General Electric. There was an article in there about a fellow who said when he went to work, he went to work for one of the large companies, and they had a number of desks in a single, big office, and this one fellow that he was beside just loved to do calculations on the valves, and he said, “Man, that was just awful work. I just could not stand to do that for the rest of my career.” And he said, “I read an article that said, ‘Many people find their thing in life, this work process, is to be good at managing the talents of others, and to get good results from being able to do that.’” That sort of clicked in. So, the next job I got was to work with Bill Cottrell in his nuclear safety group, which was really interesting work, did a lot of articles for the Nuclear Safety Journal, and that type thing, and an opportunity came for an experimental facility in the old homogenous reactor system over in 7500 building at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They had written a proposal that involved studying how efficient products behaved in a steam environment in a large, stainless steel vessel in one of the large cells over there. So, Cottrell came to me and said, “Hey, we think that you probably would be interested in doing this,” and I said, “Yeah, I would. Great.” So, I went over there and worked with people like Lou Parsley and John Wantlin and Leonard Shersky, a marvelous technician, who became a very close friend, and I found that that was just marvelous work. Out of that, toward the end of the program, this is getting into the ’60s now, the late ’60s, about that time there was a program on nuclear safety for spray technology as a removal mechanism for fission products from the environment of a pressure vessel following an accident that released those fission products from the fuel, and so instead of just – Mr. McDaniel: You know, it’s funny, I sort of understand what you’re talking about. I’ve been in Oak Ridge too long. I sort of understand what that meant. Mr. Row: There you go, but this was a fun project, and they asked me to do most of the management on that. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Mr. Row: One of the things they wanted us to do was outreach to the nuclear industry, so we had all of the conventional nuclear steam supply vendors – General Electric, Westinghouse, the firm out of Chattanooga, boilermakers down there – and a number of large engineering firms, one out of Chicago and one out of New York. And so I got in contact with those people and told them what we were going to do, we’d like to have them come and work with us, because we were trying to see what happens to fission products in a post-accident condition if you hit them with a water solution that contains an additive that grabs the iodine and holds onto it. So that worked out real well. It was about five years of just exciting experimental work. We had a review with the external guys quarterly during the year. We always presented a program at the American Nuclear Society annual and fall meeting, so it was an exciting time, and for me, it gave me a chance to see the other side of nuclear energy. I was involved in the research side. Now, I got to see the power generation side, and a whole different type of people. Lots of fun, lots of challenge, even in a fraternal organization like the American Nuclear Society, where I went in the Power Division and was active in the Program Committee, we had great competition in organizing sessions for the meetings. And when you came in to report on the meetings, there was a lot of elbowing and chiding of others for not having done their best. So, that type of environment really did help in terms of giving me additional skills and capabilities, and things of that nature. So I went through that, and went on later to become Chairman of that division and head of their Technical Publications Committee for a number of years, and Program Committee. So that was really a great part of my professional life, and a society that I became a fellow in at the end of my active work there. So after that fission product work, all of a sudden the laws changed and the Environmental Protection Act came about, and that act caused all of the nukes, and a lot of other federal-funded facilities type things, to have to do an environmental assessment of any large action, such as the siting of a nuclear plant, such as the siting of a geothermal plant that the Department of Energy or DOE, at that time ERDA [Energy Research and Development Administration]. So we got involved in that, and started out with Ed Struckness responsible for that out of Environmental Sciences Division, and I worked as his deputy, and over the time period, we did probably sixty-five of the seventy-five or eighty nukes that were in licensing at that time. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Mr. Row: We actually put together the multitalented team. We got environmental expertise from Environmental Sciences, we got materials expertise, sociology work, geographical work, business, nuclear safety, just a huge, multitalented project, probably about a hundred and thirty people at its peak. Mr. McDaniel: Wow. Mr. Row: And had to go and testify at the environmental hearings, and we had Wilson Hoard, who was the attorney for Union Carbide in those days. And Wilson went with the team that went to the first hearing. Mr. McDaniel: Okay. Mr. Row: Wilson – and many people will remember Wilson and his sense of humor – he stood up before the hearing judge as an opening statement, and testified as to the veracity of those who would speak, also to the reputation of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and then he waxed eloquent and talked about the wonderful mountains and the wonderful lakes, and invited the hearing examiner to come visit us and go fishing. Mr. McDaniel: Right, right.
Mr. Row: So from then on, anytime we went to a hearing and that hearing examiner was there, he would say, “And how is Mr. Wilson? I so enjoyed meeting him.” So, that was – Mr. McDaniel: Funny. Mr. Row: – a challenging time. It caused us, as a laboratory, to really appreciate what you could do with interdisciplinary teams. That was a marvelous result of that. So we went out and got many, many dollars doing that for a huge number of government organizations. Mr. McDaniel: Wow. Mr. Row: After that, got an opportunity to manage the nuclear waste programs, the operations of the waste, and also the research associated with it, and that was probably the most interesting of any of the career that I had, because we were moving into a time in the ’80s when things were changing. Again, the regulations came along, and the State of Tennessee regulations were applicable to the federal operations here, so we had to do a lot of change, and Bill Bibb, with the Department of Energy there, was huge in helping us change our way of doing business. Worked very closely with Bill and appreciated so much the things that he helped guide us in. So we were able to bring about the change from using dump truck in a trench to fully contained, and then sometimes concreted waste forms that have preserved the integrity of the environment at the Lab. So it was a marvelous change; ten years of very interesting stuff. Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Mr. Row: At the close of that phase of my life, the late ’80s, another thing came along and it was called Tiger Teams. Tiger Teams were the investigating teams that came to each of the DOE facilities to make sure, given the laws changing and applying more to their operations, to see if the Labs were in compliance with all of the regulations. Now, that particular activity was probably the least rewarding in terms of the ability to work with people that I ever had, simply because I had to bring to them a challenge of such enormous proportion that they resisted it very strongly. And over time, we worked through it, we didn’t have any of our facilities closed, which was the thing that Al Trivelpiece, who was the Lab Director then and asked me to do that job, he said, “Tom, I don’t want to have anything shut down,” so that was the mandate that I had, and going forward to do that, some of it was quite dicey. And so that was a really interesting period of time, working with everybody across everything in the Lab, but my previous history had allowed me to do research work in practically all the divisions, so I knew so many of the people and it made moving that rock forward a lot easier. Mr. McDaniel: Who was the ORO [Oak Ridge Office] manager at that time? Mr. Row: Joe Lagrone. Mr. McDaniel: Joe Lagrone? Mr. Row: Yeah. Mr. McDaniel: I interviewed Joe about three weeks ago. I did one of these interviews with him. Mr. Row: Yeah. Joe was the manager, and his right hand was Bill Bibb – Mr. McDaniel: Bibb, right. Mr. Row: – and having had that association with Bibb really did help. Mr. McDaniel: He talked a lot about the environmental actions that took place, you know, while he was ORO manager. Mr. Row: Yeah. Got another story. Mr. McDaniel: All right. Good. Mr. Row: During the operation of the waste management, one of the foremen from the fields, where they would put in place encapsulated waste and then cover it with dirt at the end of the day, came in one evening and he said, “You know, it’s funny. I thought I saw a human arm as we were doing the back field late yesterday.” He came in and talked to his fellows, and of course, shoom, up the ladder that thing comes, and all of a sudden, I’ve got something on the desk that says, “We think we saw a body in the buryables.” Mr. McDaniel: Oh, gosh. Okay. [laughter] Mr. Row: So we started chasing that. One of the things that we developed over time, because so many things were changing and there were so many – because of the age of the system – were so many leaks and the needs to repair, we developed a system that when something happened, we had an agreement with the state regulators and the federal regulators that we would immediately report what happened to them, and that they would not jump on our back, because we would keep them readily informed through the entire process, and when we got to a decision point, they’d be part of it. And we met in Chattanooga every month for many, many years to keep that channel open. So, this came up, and so we started immediately trying to figure out, “What in the dickens could that be?” Well, first of all, we did not figure the Mafia had the burial trenches at ORNL as part of their disposal program. We didn’t figure that anybody else had gotten mad at DOE, or ERDA at that time, to do that. No one turned up missing, and so we started sorting back, and suddenly we were in a meeting, and the thought came up, “By golly, didn’t they use mannequins in some of the experimental work at the laboratory?” And ORAU [Oak Ridge Associated Universities] was an integral part of that, and they did a lot of dosimetry type work at our fast-burst reactor. So we started chasing that, and it turned out that the probable answer was that when their dummies became contaminated or useful to the point that they had worn out the parts, they would send them to us for disposal. There was an agreement there. So, we think that the arm in the ditch was a dummy going to final resting place, but it was really funny, and I don’t know whether it was true or not, but someone said Joe Lagrone was really disappointed that we only found a dummy. Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] He wanted a real body. Mr. Row: So that was one we really enjoyed chasing. Oh, the other one, the frogs in the pond. Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, tell me about that. Mr. Row: We had a number of holding ponds there that were intermediate waste holding ponds, and, naturally, any pond – I’ve got one out front that’s our frog pond – well, all of those ponds became frog ponds. Mr. McDaniel: Sure, of course. Mr. Row: And so, one day, one of our Health Physics guys, at that time probably – yeah, I had moved on to be responsible for the Environmental Safety and Health work at the Laboratory, and had the Health Physics people as part of my organization. Well, one of the guys came in and said, “Hey, you know, I saw a frog flat, somebody had run over it, and I thought, ‘Well, you know, maybe I ought to check him,’ and he was hot, hot as the dickens.” Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Mr. Row: Well, he’d come right out of the pond, so naturally so. Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Mr. Row: So, we got into the pursuit of how do you keep the frogs in, and we developed that in concert with the environmental scientists. And, one day, when Frank Munger picked the story up, and he had written quite a bit about it, I got a phone call from a gentleman with BBC, and he said, “Mr. Row, I wanted to talk to you about the hot frogs you have,” and I said, “Yes.” So, being a manager, I gave him a straight-from-the-shoulder story, full of facts and everything, didn’t conjecture, and he said at the end of it, he said, “Mr. Row,” he said, “You seem so serious about this. It seems to me that it’s quite comical.” So I said, “Well, it is quite comical, but in talking with you, I just chose not to get into the joking part of it.” And the second part of that is I got a call from a lady in West Hills, a little old lady: “Mr. Row, I’m calling about your frogs.” And I said, “Yes, ma’am?” She said, “I think I may have one in my basement.” Mr. McDaniel: Oh, gosh. Mr. Row: And I said, “Well, ma’am, where do you live?” and she said, “I’m in West Hills.” I said, “Well, I would say the chance would be one in several million that that frog came from us, because they just don’t travel that far. They stay within a very reasonable distance of where they’re born.” She said, “Oh, I’m so relieved. Well, thank you very much,” and click. So, you know, I had a bunch of funny moments during the career. Mr. McDaniel: That’s funny. When you were doing the waste disposal, was that functional waste disposal or was that experimental waste disposal? I mean you were just managing the disposal of the radioactive – Mr. Row: We were managing the disposal of any waste that was chemically active or radioactive. Mr. McDaniel: Right, I see. Mr. Row: Yeah, so the waste program handled both those. Mr. McDaniel: Right, and I guess probably another division was finding new ways to conduct research. Mr. Row: Well, incorporated in that was the waste management research, and we had people like, oh, Don Box and others who were doing experimental work in waste forms. Lots of work in concrete waste forms. We had transuranic waste, and we were doing lots of experiments in the Chemical Tech Division on fixation of transuranics, and things of that nature. So during that waste program, that was an extraordinarily active program, and the Department of Energy had divided it up into the various waste forms, and we joked and said, “You could pack a suitcase at the start of the fiscal year, and you could stay on the road all year if you wanted to, going to meetings.” Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Mr. Row: But we were careful in choosing those that we really needed to go to. But there were quarterly report meetings for practically every one of the waste form and type meetings that the department managed. Mr. McDaniel: I guess that was kind of really a big beginning of, how shall I put it, red tape for the waste disposal, wasn’t it? Mr. Row: In about ’86. Mr. McDaniel: Regulations, and things such as that, started coming on strong. Mr. Row: I took that job in ’81, and about ’86, the paper had grown an enormous amount. There’s just no question about that. There were new regulations. Each type of waste had to be fully identified, packaged according to standards, scoped and probed before they were loaded and moved elsewhere. Mr. McDaniel: Now, was most of the waste moved someplace else, or did it stay on the reservation? Mr. Row: The transuranic wastes are now being transported to WIPP, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, and that facility is an operational disposal facility for the United States for all the transuranic waste. We had no high-level waste. The regular, low-level waste, we went to France and delivered a paper on waste management, and found that they had been using the shallow land burial above-ground burial, the pyramids, where you package the waste very carefully, you put it into a concrete form, and then you put those above-ground, above the water table, and cover that final with an impervious layer, multi-layered shield that deflects the water, and then you have a collection around it that runs the water off so that all of your nuclear and chemical waste is isolated. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Mr. Row: Yeah, so we looked at what the French did, and decided that that was a good thing for us, and we have been doing that at the lab for quite some time. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Mr. Row: Yeah. Chemical waste is shipped offsite, non-contaminated with nuclear is shipped offsite to a chemical waste disposal facility. Mr. McDaniel: Right. Well, that’s interesting. Well, let’s talk a little bit about anything else you want to talk about in your job, your work, any good stories, any people. Mr. Row: No, you know, I retired in September 1999, and it was forty years and one month, just about, and someone said, “Now, you’ll be back consulting.” I said, “No, that’s one chapter, and I just closed that last page, and I’ve got another book over here I’m just opening and really getting ready to enjoy it.” So they said, “Well, how long did it take you to adjust?” At that time, I had a 280Z, and I said, “Well, let’s see, fifteen-inch wheels, where the ORNL pavement meets the state pavement ought to be about a tenth of a second. That’s the time of adjustment.” Mr. McDaniel: That’s the time of adjustment, huhn? Mr. Row: That’s the time of – I was ready and very satisfied with where I had been in my career and had taken the retirement class at work which said, “Ten years before you think you’re gonna retire, you really ought to start finding things to do,” and I had done that, and I had been doing volunteer work all along, but started to focus on some things that I really thought I would enjoy, and so I did. Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Well, good. So, let’s go back to the beginning, not all the way to the beginning, but when you first came to Oak Ridge. Now, were you single? Mr. Row: No. Married. Mr. McDaniel: Okay, you were married, so your wife came with you when you came. Mr. Row: Yep. Mr. McDaniel: Okay, so talk about your non-work life in Oak Ridge. Mr. Row: Well, came to Oak Ridge, and we had four children. We lived in Oak Ridge, we lived in Claxton, and we lived in Clinton. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Mr. Row: Yeah, and about fifteen years, twenty years into that, when I was involved so much that I was paying more attention to work than to family life, we divorced. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Mr. Row: Yeah, and I had four wonderful kids. Pat and I have been married twenty years, and she had three children. When we met and married, all of our children were in college or almost out, and now those seven children have raised eighteen grandchildren for us. Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? My goodness. Mr. Row: And so we really have an enjoyable family. We used to have Christmas here in the house. It got to the point that I was sure fire department regulations prohibited an assembly of that nature. The room was full of paper. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness. Mr. Row: Yeah, so we started – Mr. McDaniel: So, that’d be thirty-something people, you know? Mr. Row: Oh, yeah. Yeah, there’s hardly a seat left. So we started having two of the families – and mixing it up each year – come, and we have a Christmas week. So that’s the wonderful part of it. But back in that first part, one of the – I’ve always enjoyed doing volunteer work, and in the first instance, someone said to me, “I’d like to get you on the board of Emory Valley Center,” and I went and met with them when that was just a little three-car metal building across the street from where it is now located on Emory Valley Road. They had just written a grant. We built that first building over there, the sheltered workshop, and I got talked into being Treasurer for a while, which meant I had to keep the books on that place. And when we had the first report sent in to Atlanta to our grant that we got for staffing it, the fellow sent me back a letter and said, “Mr. Row, your expenditures are twice what they are supposed to be each month,” and I wrote him back a letter and said, “The reason is we’re delivering the service that you should have sent us the money for six months earlier at twice the rate, and truthfully so, and so we’re gonna give you exactly what we said we’d do, but we’re gonna do it in six months.” He wrote a letter back and said, “Quite so, yeah,” and Jack Kay said, “Yeah, I like that.” But that was the first thing. And interestingly enough, just a year or so ago, Ken Luckman and I got together on a Library of Congress grant on the Sister City organization. Ken and I have worked on three of these now, and had a great time doing it. We brought over a number of people who were involved in educating children with the same challenge that those that attend Emory Valley School. We later had a videoconference with two of them, who were in the Siberian component of the Soviet Union. Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Mr. Row: Yeah. Mr. McDaniel: Wow. Mr. Row: We normally had done our interaction with the sister city, Obninsk, and we did two of those, but that’s been an interesting part of my life. The first one was a grant to exchange the United Way programs on youth and seniors with our sister city. The director of United Way, and Ken Luckman and myself were involved in the proposal. The director of the United Way took another job in North Dakota – why, I don’t know. Ken Luckman said, “I have to go to the office every day,” and I retired in September, and in December they called and said, “You’re responsible for the grant,” and I said, “Okay.” I had just retired. What it meant was to plan four excursions to Russia over the next two years, all the program, all the travel, all the visas and everything else, so it was wild, but gosh, what fun it was and allowed me to see a part of the world I never imagined that I would go to see. In fact, a number of us who had been active in that, or trying to plan a trip to Russia next year so that we can fly to Saint Petersburg and see that beautiful part of Russia, and then take the boat down the river to Moscow, and then go out to Obninsk and visit our friends there. Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Mr. Row: But, you know, the volunteer work, I say, has been an integral part of my life. Worked with Habitat [for Humanity], and worked with so many different organizations in town, that I have truly enjoyed it, I’m very active now in our church. Our church, First Christian Church, was the one that had the arson fire behind the hospital, and I had the challenge of getting the new church built, and that took us about five years to get from burn point to the new facility, and now I have taken on the responsibility of the landscaping at the new church, and I’m just loving it. That’s my hobby. One of our children, my son, Stuart, has a landscaping business in Knoxville, so I have professional advice as easy as picking up the phone. Mr. McDaniel: Well, that’s good. Mr. Row: Yeah. Mr. McDaniel: That’s real good. Where are your children now? Mr. Row: We have one family that is in Johnson City. We have a daughter who lives in Lake City. We have another son, who has just become the associate minister at a Presbyterian church in Chattanooga, and the rest of the kids are close. So we’re lucky. Mr. McDaniel: Good. So you just stay busy, huhn? Mr. Row: I stay busy. Mr. McDaniel: Stay busy as long as you can? Mr. Row: Yeah. I’ve been fortunate in my life to have very attentive and aggressive medical people as my advisors, and outside of letting a heart attack and bypass sneak up on me, generally, I’ve gotten on top of things early, and my health at my age is probably pretty doggone good. So I enjoy it, and I’m still very actively working outside, so that helps me keep better condition than I would if I had just read some books. Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So anything else you want to talk about, anybody else, any other stories? What was it like, because when you came to Oak Ridge in ’59, how old were you? Mr. Row: Twenty-four. Mr. McDaniel: Twenty-four, so you spent your whole adult life in Oak Ridge. Mr. Row: I did. I did, and that’s not common these days, with the kids getting out of school – well, a few years back, when the jobs were available, they average from four to six jobs in their lifetime. For me, working with a number of those people on the outside, like consulting firms, engineering firms, and things of that nature, I had a number of offers to go elsewhere, and I really looked at the space program. The space program just fascinated me, absolutely fascinated me. But every time I did a comparison, ORNL came out as the preferred choice, and so I never left. Never left, and my philosophy was I’ve spent most of my lifetime making friends here. Why go anywhere else? It’s a great city, and I’ve come to know so many people here in town and have all of the associations, a member of the Rotary Club, and that gives me the opportunity to see quite a number of people and stay very active with that. So it’s a great city to live in and be involved in what goes on here. Mr. McDaniel: It’s not too big and it’s not too small, is that right? Mr. Row: The only traffic jam really is if you want to go to Knoxville at five o’clock. Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, that’s true. Mr. Row: That’s like a bear.
Mr. McDaniel: I know. Exactly. I’ve been going to Maryville three days a week the last couple of months. I’m doing a play over there, and my rehearsal starts at six, so I usually leave around four-thirty. Mr. Row: Yep. Mr. McDaniel: That way, I can get out of town before it hits – Mr. Row: That’s right. Mr. McDaniel: – and that gives me a little time to get there and kind of get my mind ready, and things such as that. So anyway, all right, well, Tom, thank you so much for talking with us and taking time, and I’m sure this tape’s going to be around a lot longer than you and me, so – Mr. Row: That’s fine. Mr. McDaniel: – people will have a chance to hear your story and hear about your life. Mr. Row: Yep. Well, it’s been very satisfying. I wouldn’t do any of it in another way. Mr. McDaniel: All right, very good. Thanks. Mr. Row: Thank you. [end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF TOM ROW
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
August 29, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: All right, this is Keith McDaniel, and today is August the 29th, 2011, and I’m at the home of Tom Row, here in Oak Ridge. Tom, thanks for taking some time to talk to us. Mr. Row: Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity. Mr. McDaniel: This is about your life, from the very beginning, so let’s go back to the very beginning. Tell me where you were born, and something about your family, and where you went to school. Mr. Row: My family arrived in the Washington, D.C. area in the late 1890s. They were farmers and bought land in Falls Church, Virginia, and my grandfather developed a chicken farm from which he delivered eggs, and each July we would go to Falls Church area, catch the streetcar down to Washington to the Rosalyn area, which is now concrete and brick. There was a streetcar turnaround, and we had a picnic lunch, and watched the fireworks on the Washington, D.C. campus there, and then caught the streetcar back home, and drove back up to the grandparent’s, so July in Falls Church, Virginia, was something that I had as a regular thing as a child. My dad came to VPI for his education. There, he met – Mr. McDaniel: And what was that, Virginia Polytech – Mr. Row: Virginia Polytechnic Institute, in Blacksburg, Virginia. My dad was a chemical engineer. He got his Bachelor’s and Master’s there, met Mom there, and I was the result of that marriage, and they lived in Blacksburg for – probably about until 1938, when he went to Ohio State and got his doctorate in Chem Engineering. Interestingly enough, when I went back to Blacksburg for graduate school, I had the room that my parents lived in at my grandparent’s home, and my clothes closet was the closet off of that room where they had kept me in the bassinette. Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? [laughter] Mr. Row: So, I had a really unusual homecoming when I went to graduate school. Grandparents, Mom’s parents, Granddad was a contractor, built residential homes, and during World War II, after dad left VPI, he went to Ohio State, and then we went down to Lafayette, Louisiana, where he set up the Chemical Engineering Department at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in Lafayette. When World War II began, I remember coming home from church and we heard on the radio about Pearl Harbor. Dad was immediately contacted by American Viscose in Roanoke, Virginia, and asked if he would come back and be the technical engineer for the company that made rayon, which was used in all the tires for all the vehicles during the war. So we moved back to Roanoke and stayed there. An interesting sideline there was when the war was over, we visited the plant, and inside the plant was an eight-foot, khaki-colored wall, wooden wall, with triple barbwire on top, and they had been making anti-aircraft guns inside a large spinning room in the factory there that was making rayon, also. Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Mr. Row: And no one in town knew anything, dad never said anything about it, so it was a really interesting sideline. But I grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, had a marvelous time there. In fact, still great friends with many of the people I started second grade with, and we visit a couple times a year to enjoy things up there with them. Went to school at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, and got a Bachelor’s degree in Physics, and then was looking around for a place to go to graduate school, and I finally wound up at VPI in Blacksburg. Mom and Dad both graduated there, as did my granddad, so at some time in my formal education, I was bound to go to VPI. There was just no question about it. Mr. McDaniel: Right, right. Mr. Row: I get out of there in 1959, and looking around for a job. In those days, you started in November, and there were lots of job offers in those days. Had a chance to go to California, a chance to go down to the nuclear plant in South Carolina, but I had a chance to go to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and I went to my thesis advisor, Dr. Andy Robeson, who had been down to ORNL a number of times, and I asked him, I said, “What do you think about Oak Ridge National Lab?” and he said, “Oh, my gosh, that’s great.” He said, “That’s a wonderful place to work.” So about fifty percent of that comment stuck real hard, and when I made my decision, it was to come to Oak Ridge. I came to Oak Ridge on a visit and met Bob Sharpie. Mr. McDaniel: Now, what year was this, when you came for a visit? Mr. Row: ’59. Mr. McDaniel: ’59, okay. Mr. Row: Came to Oak Ridge in July, about the last day in June, moved into a Garden Apartment. It seemed like it was a hundred and twenty-five degrees; I’m sure it wasn’t. Cleaned all of the apartment up, and the next morning, I said, “I just gotta have an air conditioner.” So, this was 1959, and I went to Jackson Hardware in Jackson Square. Walked in, and the gentleman there, who turned out to be the gentleman Mr. Jackson, and I said, “I need an air conditioner.” He said, “I wish I had one for you,” and I said, “Okay, when will you be getting some more in?” And he said, “Next year.” Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Mr. Row: So I went to other stores in that foreign land of Knoxville and found one, but that’s just amazed me, and I knew I was moving into a very unusual town when they ran out of air conditioners the first of July. Mr. McDaniel: And they couldn’t get any more. [laughter]
Mr. Row: Couldn’t get any more until next year. Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Mr. Row: A very careful stock maintenance there. Mr. McDaniel: Sure, sure. Mr. Row: But my first few years here were naturally the ones of just learning what was expected and trying to do the best that you could. I came into Bud Perry’s physics group, and there I did a lot of calculations on reactor core physics and changing cladding, and this type thing, and the effect on the multiplication factors. So it was an interesting couple of years, but I really sort of felt I needed to do something else. I just was not challenged by that type of work, and, at the same time, I was reading a book, a monthly publication that was put out by General Electric. There was an article in there about a fellow who said when he went to work, he went to work for one of the large companies, and they had a number of desks in a single, big office, and this one fellow that he was beside just loved to do calculations on the valves, and he said, “Man, that was just awful work. I just could not stand to do that for the rest of my career.” And he said, “I read an article that said, ‘Many people find their thing in life, this work process, is to be good at managing the talents of others, and to get good results from being able to do that.’” That sort of clicked in. So, the next job I got was to work with Bill Cottrell in his nuclear safety group, which was really interesting work, did a lot of articles for the Nuclear Safety Journal, and that type thing, and an opportunity came for an experimental facility in the old homogenous reactor system over in 7500 building at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They had written a proposal that involved studying how efficient products behaved in a steam environment in a large, stainless steel vessel in one of the large cells over there. So, Cottrell came to me and said, “Hey, we think that you probably would be interested in doing this,” and I said, “Yeah, I would. Great.” So, I went over there and worked with people like Lou Parsley and John Wantlin and Leonard Shersky, a marvelous technician, who became a very close friend, and I found that that was just marvelous work. Out of that, toward the end of the program, this is getting into the ’60s now, the late ’60s, about that time there was a program on nuclear safety for spray technology as a removal mechanism for fission products from the environment of a pressure vessel following an accident that released those fission products from the fuel, and so instead of just – Mr. McDaniel: You know, it’s funny, I sort of understand what you’re talking about. I’ve been in Oak Ridge too long. I sort of understand what that meant. Mr. Row: There you go, but this was a fun project, and they asked me to do most of the management on that. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Mr. Row: One of the things they wanted us to do was outreach to the nuclear industry, so we had all of the conventional nuclear steam supply vendors – General Electric, Westinghouse, the firm out of Chattanooga, boilermakers down there – and a number of large engineering firms, one out of Chicago and one out of New York. And so I got in contact with those people and told them what we were going to do, we’d like to have them come and work with us, because we were trying to see what happens to fission products in a post-accident condition if you hit them with a water solution that contains an additive that grabs the iodine and holds onto it. So that worked out real well. It was about five years of just exciting experimental work. We had a review with the external guys quarterly during the year. We always presented a program at the American Nuclear Society annual and fall meeting, so it was an exciting time, and for me, it gave me a chance to see the other side of nuclear energy. I was involved in the research side. Now, I got to see the power generation side, and a whole different type of people. Lots of fun, lots of challenge, even in a fraternal organization like the American Nuclear Society, where I went in the Power Division and was active in the Program Committee, we had great competition in organizing sessions for the meetings. And when you came in to report on the meetings, there was a lot of elbowing and chiding of others for not having done their best. So, that type of environment really did help in terms of giving me additional skills and capabilities, and things of that nature. So I went through that, and went on later to become Chairman of that division and head of their Technical Publications Committee for a number of years, and Program Committee. So that was really a great part of my professional life, and a society that I became a fellow in at the end of my active work there. So after that fission product work, all of a sudden the laws changed and the Environmental Protection Act came about, and that act caused all of the nukes, and a lot of other federal-funded facilities type things, to have to do an environmental assessment of any large action, such as the siting of a nuclear plant, such as the siting of a geothermal plant that the Department of Energy or DOE, at that time ERDA [Energy Research and Development Administration]. So we got involved in that, and started out with Ed Struckness responsible for that out of Environmental Sciences Division, and I worked as his deputy, and over the time period, we did probably sixty-five of the seventy-five or eighty nukes that were in licensing at that time. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Mr. Row: We actually put together the multitalented team. We got environmental expertise from Environmental Sciences, we got materials expertise, sociology work, geographical work, business, nuclear safety, just a huge, multitalented project, probably about a hundred and thirty people at its peak. Mr. McDaniel: Wow. Mr. Row: And had to go and testify at the environmental hearings, and we had Wilson Hoard, who was the attorney for Union Carbide in those days. And Wilson went with the team that went to the first hearing. Mr. McDaniel: Okay. Mr. Row: Wilson – and many people will remember Wilson and his sense of humor – he stood up before the hearing judge as an opening statement, and testified as to the veracity of those who would speak, also to the reputation of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and then he waxed eloquent and talked about the wonderful mountains and the wonderful lakes, and invited the hearing examiner to come visit us and go fishing. Mr. McDaniel: Right, right.
Mr. Row: So from then on, anytime we went to a hearing and that hearing examiner was there, he would say, “And how is Mr. Wilson? I so enjoyed meeting him.” So, that was – Mr. McDaniel: Funny. Mr. Row: – a challenging time. It caused us, as a laboratory, to really appreciate what you could do with interdisciplinary teams. That was a marvelous result of that. So we went out and got many, many dollars doing that for a huge number of government organizations. Mr. McDaniel: Wow. Mr. Row: After that, got an opportunity to manage the nuclear waste programs, the operations of the waste, and also the research associated with it, and that was probably the most interesting of any of the career that I had, because we were moving into a time in the ’80s when things were changing. Again, the regulations came along, and the State of Tennessee regulations were applicable to the federal operations here, so we had to do a lot of change, and Bill Bibb, with the Department of Energy there, was huge in helping us change our way of doing business. Worked very closely with Bill and appreciated so much the things that he helped guide us in. So we were able to bring about the change from using dump truck in a trench to fully contained, and then sometimes concreted waste forms that have preserved the integrity of the environment at the Lab. So it was a marvelous change; ten years of very interesting stuff. Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Mr. Row: At the close of that phase of my life, the late ’80s, another thing came along and it was called Tiger Teams. Tiger Teams were the investigating teams that came to each of the DOE facilities to make sure, given the laws changing and applying more to their operations, to see if the Labs were in compliance with all of the regulations. Now, that particular activity was probably the least rewarding in terms of the ability to work with people that I ever had, simply because I had to bring to them a challenge of such enormous proportion that they resisted it very strongly. And over time, we worked through it, we didn’t have any of our facilities closed, which was the thing that Al Trivelpiece, who was the Lab Director then and asked me to do that job, he said, “Tom, I don’t want to have anything shut down,” so that was the mandate that I had, and going forward to do that, some of it was quite dicey. And so that was a really interesting period of time, working with everybody across everything in the Lab, but my previous history had allowed me to do research work in practically all the divisions, so I knew so many of the people and it made moving that rock forward a lot easier. Mr. McDaniel: Who was the ORO [Oak Ridge Office] manager at that time? Mr. Row: Joe Lagrone. Mr. McDaniel: Joe Lagrone? Mr. Row: Yeah. Mr. McDaniel: I interviewed Joe about three weeks ago. I did one of these interviews with him. Mr. Row: Yeah. Joe was the manager, and his right hand was Bill Bibb – Mr. McDaniel: Bibb, right. Mr. Row: – and having had that association with Bibb really did help. Mr. McDaniel: He talked a lot about the environmental actions that took place, you know, while he was ORO manager. Mr. Row: Yeah. Got another story. Mr. McDaniel: All right. Good. Mr. Row: During the operation of the waste management, one of the foremen from the fields, where they would put in place encapsulated waste and then cover it with dirt at the end of the day, came in one evening and he said, “You know, it’s funny. I thought I saw a human arm as we were doing the back field late yesterday.” He came in and talked to his fellows, and of course, shoom, up the ladder that thing comes, and all of a sudden, I’ve got something on the desk that says, “We think we saw a body in the buryables.” Mr. McDaniel: Oh, gosh. Okay. [laughter] Mr. Row: So we started chasing that. One of the things that we developed over time, because so many things were changing and there were so many – because of the age of the system – were so many leaks and the needs to repair, we developed a system that when something happened, we had an agreement with the state regulators and the federal regulators that we would immediately report what happened to them, and that they would not jump on our back, because we would keep them readily informed through the entire process, and when we got to a decision point, they’d be part of it. And we met in Chattanooga every month for many, many years to keep that channel open. So, this came up, and so we started immediately trying to figure out, “What in the dickens could that be?” Well, first of all, we did not figure the Mafia had the burial trenches at ORNL as part of their disposal program. We didn’t figure that anybody else had gotten mad at DOE, or ERDA at that time, to do that. No one turned up missing, and so we started sorting back, and suddenly we were in a meeting, and the thought came up, “By golly, didn’t they use mannequins in some of the experimental work at the laboratory?” And ORAU [Oak Ridge Associated Universities] was an integral part of that, and they did a lot of dosimetry type work at our fast-burst reactor. So we started chasing that, and it turned out that the probable answer was that when their dummies became contaminated or useful to the point that they had worn out the parts, they would send them to us for disposal. There was an agreement there. So, we think that the arm in the ditch was a dummy going to final resting place, but it was really funny, and I don’t know whether it was true or not, but someone said Joe Lagrone was really disappointed that we only found a dummy. Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] He wanted a real body. Mr. Row: So that was one we really enjoyed chasing. Oh, the other one, the frogs in the pond. Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, tell me about that. Mr. Row: We had a number of holding ponds there that were intermediate waste holding ponds, and, naturally, any pond – I’ve got one out front that’s our frog pond – well, all of those ponds became frog ponds. Mr. McDaniel: Sure, of course. Mr. Row: And so, one day, one of our Health Physics guys, at that time probably – yeah, I had moved on to be responsible for the Environmental Safety and Health work at the Laboratory, and had the Health Physics people as part of my organization. Well, one of the guys came in and said, “Hey, you know, I saw a frog flat, somebody had run over it, and I thought, ‘Well, you know, maybe I ought to check him,’ and he was hot, hot as the dickens.” Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Mr. Row: Well, he’d come right out of the pond, so naturally so. Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Mr. Row: So, we got into the pursuit of how do you keep the frogs in, and we developed that in concert with the environmental scientists. And, one day, when Frank Munger picked the story up, and he had written quite a bit about it, I got a phone call from a gentleman with BBC, and he said, “Mr. Row, I wanted to talk to you about the hot frogs you have,” and I said, “Yes.” So, being a manager, I gave him a straight-from-the-shoulder story, full of facts and everything, didn’t conjecture, and he said at the end of it, he said, “Mr. Row,” he said, “You seem so serious about this. It seems to me that it’s quite comical.” So I said, “Well, it is quite comical, but in talking with you, I just chose not to get into the joking part of it.” And the second part of that is I got a call from a lady in West Hills, a little old lady: “Mr. Row, I’m calling about your frogs.” And I said, “Yes, ma’am?” She said, “I think I may have one in my basement.” Mr. McDaniel: Oh, gosh. Mr. Row: And I said, “Well, ma’am, where do you live?” and she said, “I’m in West Hills.” I said, “Well, I would say the chance would be one in several million that that frog came from us, because they just don’t travel that far. They stay within a very reasonable distance of where they’re born.” She said, “Oh, I’m so relieved. Well, thank you very much,” and click. So, you know, I had a bunch of funny moments during the career. Mr. McDaniel: That’s funny. When you were doing the waste disposal, was that functional waste disposal or was that experimental waste disposal? I mean you were just managing the disposal of the radioactive – Mr. Row: We were managing the disposal of any waste that was chemically active or radioactive. Mr. McDaniel: Right, I see. Mr. Row: Yeah, so the waste program handled both those. Mr. McDaniel: Right, and I guess probably another division was finding new ways to conduct research. Mr. Row: Well, incorporated in that was the waste management research, and we had people like, oh, Don Box and others who were doing experimental work in waste forms. Lots of work in concrete waste forms. We had transuranic waste, and we were doing lots of experiments in the Chemical Tech Division on fixation of transuranics, and things of that nature. So during that waste program, that was an extraordinarily active program, and the Department of Energy had divided it up into the various waste forms, and we joked and said, “You could pack a suitcase at the start of the fiscal year, and you could stay on the road all year if you wanted to, going to meetings.” Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Mr. Row: But we were careful in choosing those that we really needed to go to. But there were quarterly report meetings for practically every one of the waste form and type meetings that the department managed. Mr. McDaniel: I guess that was kind of really a big beginning of, how shall I put it, red tape for the waste disposal, wasn’t it? Mr. Row: In about ’86. Mr. McDaniel: Regulations, and things such as that, started coming on strong. Mr. Row: I took that job in ’81, and about ’86, the paper had grown an enormous amount. There’s just no question about that. There were new regulations. Each type of waste had to be fully identified, packaged according to standards, scoped and probed before they were loaded and moved elsewhere. Mr. McDaniel: Now, was most of the waste moved someplace else, or did it stay on the reservation? Mr. Row: The transuranic wastes are now being transported to WIPP, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, and that facility is an operational disposal facility for the United States for all the transuranic waste. We had no high-level waste. The regular, low-level waste, we went to France and delivered a paper on waste management, and found that they had been using the shallow land burial above-ground burial, the pyramids, where you package the waste very carefully, you put it into a concrete form, and then you put those above-ground, above the water table, and cover that final with an impervious layer, multi-layered shield that deflects the water, and then you have a collection around it that runs the water off so that all of your nuclear and chemical waste is isolated. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Mr. Row: Yeah, so we looked at what the French did, and decided that that was a good thing for us, and we have been doing that at the lab for quite some time. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Mr. Row: Yeah. Chemical waste is shipped offsite, non-contaminated with nuclear is shipped offsite to a chemical waste disposal facility. Mr. McDaniel: Right. Well, that’s interesting. Well, let’s talk a little bit about anything else you want to talk about in your job, your work, any good stories, any people. Mr. Row: No, you know, I retired in September 1999, and it was forty years and one month, just about, and someone said, “Now, you’ll be back consulting.” I said, “No, that’s one chapter, and I just closed that last page, and I’ve got another book over here I’m just opening and really getting ready to enjoy it.” So they said, “Well, how long did it take you to adjust?” At that time, I had a 280Z, and I said, “Well, let’s see, fifteen-inch wheels, where the ORNL pavement meets the state pavement ought to be about a tenth of a second. That’s the time of adjustment.” Mr. McDaniel: That’s the time of adjustment, huhn? Mr. Row: That’s the time of – I was ready and very satisfied with where I had been in my career and had taken the retirement class at work which said, “Ten years before you think you’re gonna retire, you really ought to start finding things to do,” and I had done that, and I had been doing volunteer work all along, but started to focus on some things that I really thought I would enjoy, and so I did. Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Well, good. So, let’s go back to the beginning, not all the way to the beginning, but when you first came to Oak Ridge. Now, were you single? Mr. Row: No. Married. Mr. McDaniel: Okay, you were married, so your wife came with you when you came. Mr. Row: Yep. Mr. McDaniel: Okay, so talk about your non-work life in Oak Ridge. Mr. Row: Well, came to Oak Ridge, and we had four children. We lived in Oak Ridge, we lived in Claxton, and we lived in Clinton. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Mr. Row: Yeah, and about fifteen years, twenty years into that, when I was involved so much that I was paying more attention to work than to family life, we divorced. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? Mr. Row: Yeah, and I had four wonderful kids. Pat and I have been married twenty years, and she had three children. When we met and married, all of our children were in college or almost out, and now those seven children have raised eighteen grandchildren for us. Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? My goodness. Mr. Row: And so we really have an enjoyable family. We used to have Christmas here in the house. It got to the point that I was sure fire department regulations prohibited an assembly of that nature. The room was full of paper. Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness. Mr. Row: Yeah, so we started – Mr. McDaniel: So, that’d be thirty-something people, you know? Mr. Row: Oh, yeah. Yeah, there’s hardly a seat left. So we started having two of the families – and mixing it up each year – come, and we have a Christmas week. So that’s the wonderful part of it. But back in that first part, one of the – I’ve always enjoyed doing volunteer work, and in the first instance, someone said to me, “I’d like to get you on the board of Emory Valley Center,” and I went and met with them when that was just a little three-car metal building across the street from where it is now located on Emory Valley Road. They had just written a grant. We built that first building over there, the sheltered workshop, and I got talked into being Treasurer for a while, which meant I had to keep the books on that place. And when we had the first report sent in to Atlanta to our grant that we got for staffing it, the fellow sent me back a letter and said, “Mr. Row, your expenditures are twice what they are supposed to be each month,” and I wrote him back a letter and said, “The reason is we’re delivering the service that you should have sent us the money for six months earlier at twice the rate, and truthfully so, and so we’re gonna give you exactly what we said we’d do, but we’re gonna do it in six months.” He wrote a letter back and said, “Quite so, yeah,” and Jack Kay said, “Yeah, I like that.” But that was the first thing. And interestingly enough, just a year or so ago, Ken Luckman and I got together on a Library of Congress grant on the Sister City organization. Ken and I have worked on three of these now, and had a great time doing it. We brought over a number of people who were involved in educating children with the same challenge that those that attend Emory Valley School. We later had a videoconference with two of them, who were in the Siberian component of the Soviet Union. Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Mr. Row: Yeah. Mr. McDaniel: Wow. Mr. Row: We normally had done our interaction with the sister city, Obninsk, and we did two of those, but that’s been an interesting part of my life. The first one was a grant to exchange the United Way programs on youth and seniors with our sister city. The director of United Way, and Ken Luckman and myself were involved in the proposal. The director of the United Way took another job in North Dakota – why, I don’t know. Ken Luckman said, “I have to go to the office every day,” and I retired in September, and in December they called and said, “You’re responsible for the grant,” and I said, “Okay.” I had just retired. What it meant was to plan four excursions to Russia over the next two years, all the program, all the travel, all the visas and everything else, so it was wild, but gosh, what fun it was and allowed me to see a part of the world I never imagined that I would go to see. In fact, a number of us who had been active in that, or trying to plan a trip to Russia next year so that we can fly to Saint Petersburg and see that beautiful part of Russia, and then take the boat down the river to Moscow, and then go out to Obninsk and visit our friends there. Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Mr. Row: But, you know, the volunteer work, I say, has been an integral part of my life. Worked with Habitat [for Humanity], and worked with so many different organizations in town, that I have truly enjoyed it, I’m very active now in our church. Our church, First Christian Church, was the one that had the arson fire behind the hospital, and I had the challenge of getting the new church built, and that took us about five years to get from burn point to the new facility, and now I have taken on the responsibility of the landscaping at the new church, and I’m just loving it. That’s my hobby. One of our children, my son, Stuart, has a landscaping business in Knoxville, so I have professional advice as easy as picking up the phone. Mr. McDaniel: Well, that’s good. Mr. Row: Yeah. Mr. McDaniel: That’s real good. Where are your children now? Mr. Row: We have one family that is in Johnson City. We have a daughter who lives in Lake City. We have another son, who has just become the associate minister at a Presbyterian church in Chattanooga, and the rest of the kids are close. So we’re lucky. Mr. McDaniel: Good. So you just stay busy, huhn? Mr. Row: I stay busy. Mr. McDaniel: Stay busy as long as you can? Mr. Row: Yeah. I’ve been fortunate in my life to have very attentive and aggressive medical people as my advisors, and outside of letting a heart attack and bypass sneak up on me, generally, I’ve gotten on top of things early, and my health at my age is probably pretty doggone good. So I enjoy it, and I’m still very actively working outside, so that helps me keep better condition than I would if I had just read some books. Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So anything else you want to talk about, anybody else, any other stories? What was it like, because when you came to Oak Ridge in ’59, how old were you? Mr. Row: Twenty-four. Mr. McDaniel: Twenty-four, so you spent your whole adult life in Oak Ridge. Mr. Row: I did. I did, and that’s not common these days, with the kids getting out of school – well, a few years back, when the jobs were available, they average from four to six jobs in their lifetime. For me, working with a number of those people on the outside, like consulting firms, engineering firms, and things of that nature, I had a number of offers to go elsewhere, and I really looked at the space program. The space program just fascinated me, absolutely fascinated me. But every time I did a comparison, ORNL came out as the preferred choice, and so I never left. Never left, and my philosophy was I’ve spent most of my lifetime making friends here. Why go anywhere else? It’s a great city, and I’ve come to know so many people here in town and have all of the associations, a member of the Rotary Club, and that gives me the opportunity to see quite a number of people and stay very active with that. So it’s a great city to live in and be involved in what goes on here. Mr. McDaniel: It’s not too big and it’s not too small, is that right? Mr. Row: The only traffic jam really is if you want to go to Knoxville at five o’clock. Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, that’s true. Mr. Row: That’s like a bear.
Mr. McDaniel: I know. Exactly. I’ve been going to Maryville three days a week the last couple of months. I’m doing a play over there, and my rehearsal starts at six, so I usually leave around four-thirty. Mr. Row: Yep. Mr. McDaniel: That way, I can get out of town before it hits – Mr. Row: That’s right. Mr. McDaniel: – and that gives me a little time to get there and kind of get my mind ready, and things such as that. So anyway, all right, well, Tom, thank you so much for talking with us and taking time, and I’m sure this tape’s going to be around a lot longer than you and me, so – Mr. Row: That’s fine. Mr. McDaniel: – people will have a chance to hear your story and hear about your life. Mr. Row: Yep. Well, it’s been very satisfying. I wouldn’t do any of it in another way. Mr. McDaniel: All right, very good. Thanks. Mr. Row: Thank you. [end of recording]